Generation X here, well qualified, decent experience, staff management, budget management, resource management;. Became completely disillusioned and stripped of all ambition when I went into a senior-ish role in my profession (library and information related) a few years ago.
The demands were impossible. The members of the senior management team were mad. All of them. I don't know if anyone had ever explained about that "a day only has 24 hours approx" law of physics thing. The stupid pointless projects to make the aforesaid management look good in the eyes of even more senior management were never-ending. Together with a few life events, it ended up making me very ill to the extent I couldn't work for a few years.
It's not that I'm not ambitious any more, exactly, I still have plenty of personal ambition for things I want to achieve or experience outside work where I won't have insane senior managers breathing down my neck and having to convince me that illogical policies are going to save the world. My current manager is great although they have a fair amount of ridiculousness to put up with from their managers.
I'm very happy to have gone several levels back down the totem pole when I was able to go back to work and that's where I'm staying until I'm able to retire.
IF I'm ever able to retire. I"m certainly not banking on it, my generation and those after me are far more likely to drop dead in harness... If the pandemics and the climate change don't get us first, obviously.
At my current grade, I can sustain the level of activity and stress I have now for a very long time, assuming I don't get ill again. Why would I think about putting myself into toxic, nonsensical management ever again? I'm also lucky enough to be able to do pretty much 100% of what I do from home but that depends on the employer. So why would I change jobs at this stage, unless I absolutely had to?
Also, COVID has finally made some of my older colleagues take at least part-retirement, often a good 10 years past what would once have been their official retirement date. One of the side-effects of their having stayed in their jobs so long (sometimes genuinely due to finances, sometimes due to boredom) is that the usual churn in the middle simply hasn't happened. For a long time, between about 2008 to 2019, there were very few junior roles in many professions.
We've also found it tricky to recruit (not just my organisation, many others, anecdotally), which is something I've never seen before in my line of work. Not to this extent. And it's not only certain parts of the country, either.
Although some employers are making it much harder for themselves than they need to by refusing to offer even partial flexible/home-based working. Unless your job is customer or patient-facing, or you're in a training session or meeting, what does it matter if the actual work gets done at 11pm or 4am rather than between 8am and 5.30pm?
I see vacancies in my inbox and on various mailing lists every day now, although often some of the person specs are a bit, well, ambitious. My favourite this week is a trainee post (so, by definition, someone who needs training) who already has great social media experience, can write programs in R, Python, and knows various other ICT applications including image manipulation; can handle customer service enquiries, support training sessions and elearning; has a knowledge of NLP (!); and who already knows every specialist subject resource ever.
I don't think that particular employer was asking for the ability to walk on water but I could be wrong, the spec went on for several pages. Just a guess here, but I'm not sure they're going to be able to recruit quickly to that one, even if it is in a part of the country that has historically high unemployment.
The other thing people my age have learned over the years, if they're in pretty much any profession, is which organisations (and managers) to avoid...